Chapter 9 Billie
Billie
My father’s best friend is in my kitchen making coffee. He’s in my kitchen because last night I gave him my v-card and he stayed the night. What is my life right now?
Declan Maguire has made my coffee perfectly and he's leaning against my kitchen counter like he's been doing it for years.
He hands me a mug when I come out of my bedroom. His hands. The same hands that were holding my wrists while he fucked my brains out.
It's early. I'm in my oversized Pokémon shirt and yesterday's mascara. He's fully dressed, jacket and everything, like a man who has already calculated his exit and is just waiting for the polite window to use it. The power imbalance is mainly cosmetic but it still registers.
"Sleep okay?" he says.
"Deeply," I say. "You?"
A beat. "Not really."
I look at him over my mug. He looks back with the expression I've been trying to decode since this whole thing started.
"You should've woken me up," I say.
"You were asleep."
"That's sort of what waking someone up involves, Declan."
There’s a strangely comfortable silence as we drink our coffee.
Finally, he speaks again. "I have a nine o'clock call," he says.
"Okay."
"Billie."
"Declan." I set down my mug. "I'm not going to make you give a speech.
We can skip the part where you try to construct a sentence about what happened and I watch you suffer through it.
I've seen you try to give a toast at my dad's birthday.
I know what that looks like and neither of us needs it this morning. "
"Okay," he says.
"Okay."
Neither of us moves.
"I'll call you tonight," he says.
"Okay," I say, and I'm aware that we've turned okay into a load-bearing word. Some things are better left at “okay” until you know what they are.
He sets his mug in the sink. Picks up his jacket from the chair.
"You cancelled the account," I say.
He stops.
I didn't plan to say it. It came out the same way most of my important sentences come out: before the committee approves the wording.
"Didn't feel right," he says. "Keeping it."
I nod. DarkWatcher45, seven months, both tiers. Cancelled. Neither of us says what that means. Neither of us needs to.
He crosses to where I'm standing and puts his hand to my jaw. Just that. Just a moment. His thumb against my cheekbone, warm and careful, and I just let it happen, which is very unlike me and I'm choosing not to examine that right now.
Then he leaves.
I listen to his footsteps down to the lobby.
The door. I do not follow him. I pour the rest of my coffee and stand in my kitchen and I do not think about any of the things that are now true, because there's an ordering problem: I need to think about them in the right sequence and I haven't worked out the sequence yet.
There's a glass of water I meant to get last night.
I go to get it.
My kitchen window looks down onto the street. I know this. I've stood at this window a hundred times in the two years I've lived here. Watching for delivery drivers, watching for weather, watching for nothing. I'm not thinking about the window at all when I arrive at it.
His car is still there.
I step back from the glass instinctively, into the dark of the kitchen, light off. He can't see me from the street. I'm in shadow and the angles don't work.
But I can see him.
His car is at the curb. Not pulled fully to the side the way you park when you're just parking, but angled.
Pointed. I've watched enough crime documentaries to know what deliberate positioning looks like and this is it: a man who has placed himself where he has line of sight to a window, and the window is mine, and he is sitting in his car at seven forty-five in the morning on my street looking up at my building.
I stand in my kitchen and watch him.
I would like to report that I find this alarming, or at minimum odd, but I don't. A forty-eight-year-old security professional in a sensible dark car having some kind of private moment while aimed at my window is a lot of things.
It is both devastating and slightly absurd.
It is the most Declan Maguire thing I have ever witnessed, and I have witnessed quite a bit over twenty-one years, including the time he showed up to my middle school play in a full suit because he thought it was a formal event.
He sat in the front row. He was the only person in a tie.
He watched the entire production of Grease without changing expression and then told me I had good stage presence.
There's an admin side to streaming that nobody tells you about when you get into it.
The numbers are always there. Subscriber counts, viewer tallies, dollar amounts, tier breakdowns.
All just data, neutral, and you learn quickly not to attach too much to any individual number.
Numbers go up, numbers go down. That's the nature of content. That's fine.
I've been doing this for eighteen months and I'm very rational about the numbers.
Here's what I'm not going to say out loud and what I know anyway: I don't know what BrattyBaby is without DarkWatcher watching.
That's not a tragedy. That's not even a crisis.
It's just a question I don't have the answer to yet, sitting quietly in my chest next to all the other things that changed last night.
I've been performing a version of myself on camera for eighteen months and for the last seven of those months I've known exactly who was on the other side of the screen.
I aimed my content at him. I calibrated my voice for him.
I learned his response patterns and his timing and the rhythm of his attention.
And now he's not there, and I'm supposed to go live, and I don't know who I'm performing for anymore.
Or whether performing is still the right word for what I do.